355. Chasing Meaning

After reading a strange text, we can be left wondering what it means. It seems to be saying something important, but we aren’t sure what. We wonder if perhaps we’ve missed something and this has prevented us from reaching the whole meaning.

We want to go back and reread, we want to seek out context, we want to get more information. We want to do these things so that we can find the point of the text. Knowing the point feels like the most important thing. But our anxiety over not having a clear meaning can easily mislead us. It can pull us away from what we need to see and drag our attention back into the text, forcing us to analyze every last detail as we grasp for definite knowledge.

We don’t need to force ourselves to get something out of everything we read. Reading is just like every other experience we have: we might see some meaning in it or we might not. Unless we’re overcome by paranoia, we don’t usually concern ourselves with the meaning of every little thing that happens to us.

What we do need is to allow ourselves to sit with our experiences, including our experiences of reading texts. We have to allow ourselves to reflect without being pulled away by attachments to precision or clarity. By sitting with our experiences, we gain something we cannot measure or explain, but which also broadens our awareness of the world and ourselves.

To allow ourselves to reflect fully, we need to allow our attention the freedom to linger and wander, to return to past experiences and to leave them, as needed. It is always attention that helps us see more of what is happening in and around us, and when our attention is the most open and free, we have the greatest chance to see the most in every experience.